Federico Sartorio @ Photo.net explains how to get people to smile for your pictures.

Federico writes:

Tired of being unable to take good photos of your friends / kids? Here’s my tutorial on how to create the cheapest and wackiest hot-shoe attachement for your camera.

PEZ makes people smile!

Here are three easy steps:

buy a PEZ sweet dispenser in any grocery store, the more ridiculous, the better

using a cutter, trim the feet of the dispenser, leaving a 2-3 mm wide plastic strip on each side. Check the width of your camera’s hot shoe if you are not sure

slide the dispenser in the hot shoe of your camera, it should fit naturally!

Federico claims success:

Now you are ready to shoot! The best use for this attachement is to make people laugh and quickly snap a joyful portrait of them. You can then reward them with a sweet for added happiness. I’ve tested it on kids and friends and it works most of the time!

I’m due for a new digital camera. A few years ago I bought a 5 megapixel Olympus C-5050 Zoom, which at the time set me back about 800 euros.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with this particular camera, but in a few weeks I’ll be going on vacation and I’m looking for a nice little pocket sized camera to document the trip. The C-5050 is just a little too bulky and it always feels like a bit of a hassle to carry around, especially for taking holiday pictures.

Digital cameras have improved quite a lot over the last few years, resulting in increased value-for-money. I was checking the 200-300 euro price range and couldn’t really find any camera that was outright bad. It’s kind of hard picking the best camera with so many models available.

Right now I think I’ll go for the Lumix® DMC-TZ3 (Panasonic), a 7.2-Megapixel camera with a 28mm wide-angle lens, image stabilization and 10x optical zoom.

So how do you get these images?
For the best results you need a tripod. An exposure of around 10-30 sec. or longer if needed. Set the camera to ISO100 and close your aperture as much as possible, to prevent overexpose. Experiment to get the best results!

A digital camera inside a parcel looks out through a small hole and captures images of its journey through the postal system. The Spy Box was sent from my studio to the gallery taking an image every 10 seconds recording a total of 6994 images these were then edited together to create an animated slideshow.

I’ve experienced some “oh no, batteries died!” moments in the past, so it’s cool to see a big player is coming up with a whole range of gear which a) does not require batteries to operate, b) is environmentally friendly!

One of the more interesting devices of the lot is the Spin N’ Snap digital camera (pictured above), which you charge up simply by placing your fingers in the two holes (which also double as a viewfinder) and spinning it around a few times. Taking a slightly different but equally non-power-hungry route is the Crank N’ Capture camera, which can also apparently capture video of some sort. Rounding out the line up are the Pull N’ Play stereo headphones, the Push POWER Play device (apparently a viewer of some sort), which you charge by rolling it back and forth on a table, and the “Juice Box,” which packs a fold out solar panel that can be used to charge your other devices.

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